[Foundation-l] An argument for strong copyleft

[Erik Moeller]

On 4/7/08, Pharos <pharosofalexandria at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to protect the "freeness" of actual derivatives of my work,
>  which is why I dislike CC-BY.  What I don't want is a purity test for
>  something that I and most people would not consider a derivative work,
>  but merely using two works on the same page.

Are you aware that CC-BY-SA already explicitly invokes the copyleft
prevision for "time-synchronized" use, e.g., putting your photo in a
YouTube clip? I find the argument that this _should_ invoke copyleft,
while the use of a photo to support a newspaper article should not,
very difficult to follow.

The key phrase used by both the GFDL and CC-BY-SA to identify
collections/aggregations is "separate and independent". I would argue
that a photo that supports the content of an article may be separate,
but it's not independent: The article is semantically weaker without
the photo than it is with it. I would further argue that this class of
"separate but dependent" uses merits a medium-strength copyleft:
combination with works under any free license (as per DFCW), whereas
"not separate and dependent" should invoke copyleft under the same
license.

This would make it reasonably legally simple to use.

Mind you, even if you believe CC-BY-SA and GFDL should _not_ work like
this, you shouldn't be happy with the current state, which is
ambiguous enough for different people to give very different
interpretations of very similar licensing clauses.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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